March 28, 2013

We are proud to announce that for the first time in the project's history, SuperTuxKart has applied for participating in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program.

So what is this about? From their website:

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students
stipends to write code for open source projects. We have worked with the
open source community to identify and fund exciting projects for the
upcoming summer.

In other words, us applying for this program means that potentially we can get one or more students aged 18 or older helping with the code side of STK, if we are among the selected open source projects. The students themselves will receive stipends of up to 5000$ (USD) each for their work, provided by Google, and we as a project can also receive 500$ per student we mentor. It's a huge win-win! They get to improve their programming skills, being helped and mentored by us, and also getting paid and hopefully seeing their work in an upcoming version of SuperTuxKart. We get more developers for the summer we can get exciting and useful code from, and hopefully they'll want to stay with us afterwards as well.

Still unsure of what this is about? Please head over to the GSoC FAQ page, where this concept is explained in detail and probably more clearly than what I've been able to do.

However, after all this is said and done, we don't know yet if we will be among the chosen projects this year. On April 8 Google will announce which of the applying projects have been selected.

Are you a student wanting to participate with SuperTuxKart as your project? If you already want to get in touch with us, please do! Even if we don't get selected and you want to work on something else this summer, getting to know us and the project won't hurt, and hopefully you'll want to help with this project later.

Are you a programmer but not participating in Google Summer of Code 2013 for various reasons? Please feel free to join up with us any time! We could use more people in all programmer related areas, be it new features, bug fixes, documentation or code cleanup.